Comments on: Moore’s Law is Dead - Long Live Moore’s Law!

By: Mathieu’s log » Blog Archive » Easy parallelization with data decomposition

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 18:17:46 +0000

[...] Moore’s law, contrary to what is often thought still holds true, the exponential processor transistor growth predicted by Moore does not always translate into [...]

By: L505

L505 — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 00:30:35 +0000

Moore’s law is not a law. It is a trend he charted. The fact that foreign exchange or stock market goes up a certain amount in a certain period of time is not a law. It is a trend.

By: Michael Suess

Michael Suess — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 19:45:00 +0000

@Remi: I could be wrong here, but isn’t the x86 a CISC-architecture? Still is and has always been. Internally, microcode is used to translate the instructions into more RISC-like ones, but the architecture is still a CISC. See this for details:
http://ctas.poly.asu.edu/bgannod/CET520/Spring02/Projects/demone.htm

By: Remi Chateauneu

Remi Chateauneu — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 14:55:47 +0000

“The density of transistors on chips doubles every 24 month.”
Yes, higher transistors density is used for more cores, deeper RISC pipes, more complex caches and instructions processing (branch prediction, hyper-threading), etc..

But I am surprised of how many new instructions sets ( MMX, SSE3, SSE4 ) appear in the Intel architecture ? Can instructions as MPSADBW ( Compute eight offset sums of absolute differences ) or PHSUBD (Packed Horizontal Substract ) still be qualified as RISC ? Or will the trend be to the return of CISC-like instructions, as the safest way to have more performance (Remember Vax’s POLYD: Evaluate polynomial D_floating …) ?

By: Michael Suess

Michael Suess — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 15:19:10 +0000

@Sonila: I am not sure I can follow your argumentation here. Are you disagreeing with the points raised in my post? You seem to be agreeing to at least some of them, yet I fail to see your point. I might be being dense, but I just cannot twist my head enough to follow your arguments…

By: Sonila

Sonila — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 22:29:48 +0000

a crucial role. That’s why one needs to be very careful in mentioning X or Y law, without taking into account a profound insight and conditions that the law might apply.

By: Sonila

Sonila — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 22:26:05 +0000

The problem is not as easy as it seems to be. When calculating the processing power more than one factor are to be taking into account. Clock speed is one of the metrics but it is very relative as a concept. In dual-core or cell processors era, the computing power makes more sense when speaking about how fast a certain task can be executed.
According to parallel processing, Amdahl’s Law is stressing the sequential heritage on the algorithms that can be used on a certain problems and the architecture plays

By: As of today, I’ve had more spam comments than page views. « The View from the Cheap Seats

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 05:38:12 +0000

[...] of variants––I pondered this morning an equation for the infocalypse, derived from Moore’s Law and including some constants to represent the accelerating construction of mega-server-farms, the [...]

By: Michael Suess

Michael Suess — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 19:46:18 +0000

I know many software developers don’t like the move to multi-cores, because it turns their world upside down. But if you see it as a chance to separate yourself from the crowd, the future may look brighter - and thats why you are here and reading this, right? The future is parallel, you either accept that and ride the wave or it rides you

By: Mark Miller

Mark Miller — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 01:00:46 +0000

You’ve reminded me of the true meaning of Moore’s Law. I had been under the misimpression that it had to do with speed, because that’s the popular notion of it. Probably the last time I heard this definition was when I was getting my CS degree 14 years ago.

Moore’s Law = greater speed with time seemed like a good analogy for most people, because that’s what actually happened for so many years.

It seems to me though that there are practical limits being reached, because of the move to multiple cores. It’s not as if we all chose this path. If you ask software developers (me included), none of us are looking upon this with much glee. I’m not sure what’s holding up 64-bit adoption. That would seem to be the next logical step. Maybe it’s the same heat issue. Ideally us developers would like to see the single-core approach continue on until effective methods of parallel computing are developed, beyond the use of threads and semaphores or RPC between multiple processes. This isn’t the world we live in today. The single-core approach has reached its limit, and we’re now having to deal with that.

Gaining more speed out of these multiple cores is going to be a greater challenge than it was to take advantage of 32-bit processing when that was a new thing in the PC world.